Ashton speech on EU foreign policy. In a far-ranging lecture, given in Athens last week, the EU foreign policy chief talks about “the basic rationale” for wanting a stronger EU foreign policy, about how the Lisbon Treaty “is making a positive difference”, and about her main policy priorities for 2010 and beyond (build the EU diplomatic service, “promote stability and reform in the neighbourhood” and work with strategic partners).
While she is elaborating on the new diplomatic service, Ashton talks about “the primacy of politics”:
Everything we do abroad is to create the space for politics to work effectively. Whatever the problem, in the end there are only political solutions, and it is the single most important lesson I think we have learnt in Europe in the last few years. Of course, you could intervene. You could hold the ring for a while, you could destroy a terrorist camp, you can keep people alive by feeding them emergency aid, all of this has value, and is something we have to do, but you won’t change the fundamental dynamics unless you change the politics. If success in development was about money, Nigeria or the Democratic Republic of Congo or Haiti would be stable and developed.
If success and crisis management was about the scale of committed resources, Irak and Afghanistan would be better places. These are problems to do with politics that we need to establish and we have a role in enabling changes that need to happen. So when we build the service, we bring together all these different elements, development crisis management, our ability with civilian and military resources, our support on the ground, our electoral monitoring missions, all of the different things that Europe does so well and which is so highly praised across the world. We need to make sure that we frame them in a strategy that makes sense, a strategy that gives us a Foreign Policy fit for the European Union of the 21st century.
Ashton also gives an interesting definition of the EU and its global role:
I describe the EU at its heart, as a giant conflict resolution machine that enables the member-states to tackle cross-border problems on the basis of agreed rules. As it happens, it is also a pretty good description of what global governance should be all about.
So we need the EU not just for us in Europe, but also as the vehicle to act in a fast-changing world and to influence its direction with our ideas.
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